Is Gemstone Therapy Just a Placebo?

Why do I believe that Jyotish gemstones really work? There are a few different ways, though it’s important to note that poor quality gemstones are never effective for these purposes. This discussion is related to pure, natural, untreated Jyotish gemstones of exceptional clarity only.

Let’s review 5 reasons I believe that astrological gemstones are truly effective.

1. Even skeptics report results

Many of our customers are spouses or family members purchasing gems on behalf of their loved ones. These are some of the most interesting sales as the results reported back to us usually come from third party observers. Even people who don’t believe in the power of astrological gemstones, sometimes wearing them reluctantly in the beginning, have told us of significant and beneficial shifts after wearing the right gems for some time.

Jay likes to tell the story of a customer who called us several years ago asking if we would buy back a yellow sapphire we sold him. He didn’t think it ever worked and wanted to get something back for it many years later. Jay started asking him questions about how his life has been going overall since he got the gem. At the time of the purchase, he had no money and had used a line of credit to pay for the stone as an act of desperation. Upon reviewing the course of the past several years, the man explained that he had a very lucrative business now, a great deal of income, and was successful in every area of his life. By the end of the call he felt that all of the predicted results of wearing the yellow sapphire had come true, and he decided to keep the gem.

I was quite a skeptic myself when I first began working for Astrological Gem in 2007. I accepted a job position as a product photographer with no interest in Jyotish or Ayurveda, I just liked gems. Curiosity got the better of me though and I began trying out every type of stone we carried, finding that I had very quick and immediate positive results when strengthening my benefic planets and strange and negative experiences testing gems I shouldn’t wear. This inspired me to begin believing in the effects of gems, studying Jyotish in depth to better understand what our customers were experiencing, and leads me to my next point about why I believe our gemstones work.

2. Poorly prescribed gemstones have negative effects on people

This, to me, is the strongest proof that Jyotish gemstone therapy is real. When someone is wearing the wrong gemstone, it’s almost always really obvious. If gemstones were just a placebo, the worst that would happen is nothing at all.

One of the hardest parts of my job is dealing with a wrong gemstone prescription, especially when someone was recommended a gem by a trusted Ayurvedic physician or astrologer or even worse, their guru. A few years ago we had a woman’s guru in India recommended that she wear a very powerful blue sapphire. After seeing her chart, I got pretty nervous about the sale, but it wasn’t my place to contradict somebody’s beloved guru! I requested that Jay produce a waiver to go with this sale, offering the customer an option to back out of the purchase some time later if needed. This was a very powerful stone and a significant investment. Sure enough, within a couple of months, we got a call from the woman’s husband begging us to take the sapphire back, as things had gotten so horrendously miserable for his wife since she had the gem. We wound up switching the blue sapphire out for the proper stones for her and she’s been on the upswing ever since.

Just last month, an astrologer recommended a red coral to a woman in Arizona and I shipped it out to her to test. The stone was recommended based on her navamsha, a divisional of the Jyotish chart, which is not how we normally do things. The coral was not a good match for her birth chart. (Her astrologer is well known and very talented and intuitive overall, but even good astrologers don’t always know how to recommend gemstones properly.) Three days in, this poor woman called me in tears, an absolute mess from having this red coral around her. Accidents and uncontrollable mood swings were overwhelming her. I emailed her a shipping label to overnight the coral back to us and shipped her the right stone for her chart, a phenakite to strengthen Venus. She loved it so much that, when she mailed it back to us to have it set into a ring, she said she was having “withdrawals” from not having it around anymore.

3. People report results that match their astrological charts

Not only can Jyotish suggest what a gemstone is likely to do for a person, but in my experience we can retroactively guess the results that have occurred for people who have been wearing gems for quite some time. If someone tells me they’ve been wearing a certain stone for many years, and I look at their chart, I can guess with great accuracy the events that have occurred since they put it on.

Another interesting thing we see, occasionally, is that the desired results happen with gemstones but in ways our customers weren’t expecting. Perhaps they wanted happiness in their job and got immediately fired for example, only to get the job of their dreams a month later. We’ve also seen people buy gemstones to save toxic relationships and the partnerships actually dissolve after the gems are put on, only for our clients to meet the real love of their lives some time after the breakup. We don’t always know what’s in store for us but Jyotish gemstones are traditionally worn to help us reach our ultimate fulfillment and our highest potential. Trusting the process goes a really long way.

4. Poor gemstones don’t work and are definitely more of a placebo effect

The art of properly recommending Jyotish gemstones has been lost in general, mainly due to a tremendous amount of online misinformation coming out of India. India is the motherland of Vedic Astrology but they have very poor quality gems, huge amounts of cheap stones that can be sold to the masses for next to nothing. People will put on anything and hope for the best, and in these cases, we do suspect the placebo effect is at play. Any gemstone can be prescribed, good or bad, and nobody knows what works and what doesn’t because the stones aren’t really doing anything at all. If people think the wrong stone is providing good results, and the stone they’re wearing is terrible quality, it’s probably just the power of suggestion that’s working, not the gem itself. (Read more about the risks of buying Jyotish gemstones in India here.)

5. I can sense the effects that gemstones have on other people

I’m often called the “gem whisperer” in this field because I have a sixth sense for matching people to the right stones. (Read more about when Jyotish gemstones speak to me here.) I had a lady who couldn’t energetically “feel” gemstones visit our office a couple months ago to look at emeralds, and every time she picked up this one particular 2ct oval stone, I could sense it in her hand without even looking at her directly. She reviewed our emeralds as I entered her into our computer system in the showroom. Twice during that time I’d exclaim, “Are you holding that oval emerald again?!” a second after she’d pick it up. The glow and radiance this gemstone gave her was completely obvious to me, even if it wasn’t obvious to her at all. She took the stone home to test, reported very significant positive results in her outer world, and wound up keeping it for good.

At an astrology conference late last year, a well-known Vedic astrologer was interested in getting a yellow sapphire for himself. The stone that was energetically the best match for him was making itself known very loudly to me, but I am not an authority at these conferences and chose to humbly suggest a few options for him to review based on price. A very popular healer did a consultation with the astrologer later that day though and verified through muscle testing and his own intuition that the gem I liked the most for him was the best match of all the yellow sapphires. Frequently I like to keep my strong opinions to myself and have a match verified in some other way, as it almost always syncs up and gives validity to the intuitive selection process.

In defense of placebos

With all of that said, the placebo effect is immensely powerful and actually gives testament to the body’s ability to heal itself. In some ways the framework of our entire reality is a placebo effect – our perceptions affect everything within and around us.

I love homeopathic medicine, for example, and I’ve used it for everything from migraines to infected wounds. I suspect homeopathy is just a placebo because negative side effects are so uncommon – it either works for a person or it doesn’t do anything. And that’s great! Other migraine sufferers will understand, if a placebo stops that degree of intense physical pain, it’s the best placebo ever!

It’s also worth noting that, in my experience, the power of intention makes Jyotish gemstones work even better. So while I’ve found they still work even if we’re not paying attention to them, the results are much more clear and profound when we participate in the process of our own growth. (Learn more about how astrological gemstones work here.)

You can read about our gem consultations here.

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Tiffany April Raines is the Head of Sales at Astrological Gem International. Trained at the American College of Vedic Astrology and certified as a gemstone advisor through the Planetary Gemologists Association, she has been serving the Vedic Astrology community with research-based gemstone insight and advice for over 10 years. She can be contacted at tiffany@astrologicalgem.com.

Please note: In order to provide the most time and best service possible for our paying customers, we are no longer able to respond to all of the requests we receive for gemstone recommendations. We welcome you instead to try our Free Gem Report if you are still in the learning and research phase of your Jyotish gemstone journey. This can be found at AstrologicalGemstones.com.